All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation (38 page)

The differences were that, until recently, there was less chance that they might be able to safely open up to anyone, a friend or counselor or parent. There was little chance that, if they found themselves pregnant or suffering from an STD, they would have a safe or legal venue to seek help.

That's part of what made Helen Gurley Brown's
Sex and the Single Girl
so revolutionary in 1962, remembered Letty Cottin Pogrebin. It was, she recalled, “the meeting point between a former era and that next one that came after. It was so liberatory for a woman of my generation.” As undergraduates in the 1950s, Pogrebin said, she and her friends used to gossip about a student who was openly sexually active, but, at a reunion twenty-five years later, they admitted to each other that none of them had been virgins at the time. “None of us were virgins and all of us were gossiping and putting her down,” she said. “You had to live a lie, thinking you were the only one.” Pogrebin, like many women of her generation, had had an abortion before college graduation, but had told no one. “I just didn't know what I was doing and there was no pill.” Abortion, she said, “was everyone's deep, dark secret.”

The cone of silence that shrouded women's physical and sexual experiences began to crack. “Helen outed us,” said Pogrebin, “Gurley Brown outed the fact that single women have sex.” It helped, she said, that she was “respectable enough and successful enough and old enough to make it not whorish.” Without prompting, fifty years later, Pogrebin remembered that Gurley Brown had been thirty-seven when she got married.

Today's college student may indeed feel terrible for having gone home with a wretched guy who rubbed up against her at a frat party, and telling her that it might have been worse fifty years ago won't alleviate that pain. But the good, in fact, the
great
, news is that these days, she doesn't have
to spend the rest of her life married to that wretched frat guy, or live in social purgatory should their encounter become public.

What's more, none of the inequities cited by hookup culture detractors are addressed, much less solved, by the alternatives they want to proffer. In Hess's words, “If young women can't find someone they like making out with just once, the solution is not to make out with the same person over and over again.”
²⁹

Ambivalence about romantic commitment may be more evident today, but what it reveals is not necessarily a brand-new set of impulses, but rather a broader array of romantic and sexual preferences and metabolisms than have previously been on display. Now that we have greater freedom to consider doing other things with our lives, some individuals, women and men, might find they enjoy coupling cozily; others might enjoy sleeping around or being celibate. As with most developed preferences, it's hard for many of us to imagine desires that diverge from ours: Why do some people love opera and others love Nicki Minaj? Some people want to try every new restaurant and others want to stay home and watch NASCAR. Class, race, age, identity, opportunity, and community figure into these preferences; they shape the options we have available to us and the way the people around us behave; that's also true of relationship patterns.

But even given these contextual influences, what today's world allows is a diversity of romantic and sexual behaviors that we are still tempted to diagnose as aberrant or immature because they are not what we used to expect (or demand) of adults. But what we used to expect and demand is that everyone would get herded into the same conjugal channel. Quite suddenly, people are freer to take off in a number of directions, and they're taking advantage of that freedom.

That diversity of behavior is startling. It's different, uncharted, and admittedly a little scary. It certainly doesn't end well for everyone. But it's a grave mistake to argue that the single, narrow sexual chute into which most of us were once packed led more people to a greater number of happy endings.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin remembers sitting in her garden apartment in Greenwich Village in 1963, having just returned from a work trip that had taken her to seven countries, and thinking “I'm never going to get married.” She was twenty-three, and this recent trip, she said, short-circuited any lingering assumptions that she ever needed to become a wife, dependent on a husband. “Being single in a self-actualized way proves you can do things: I fixed my own toilet; I wired lamps; I changed tires. I didn't have somebody to do stuff for me. The things you do on your own, they buttress you so that you can't become poor dear wifey.”

The next day, Pogrebin got a call from a man inviting her to spend her birthday on Fire Island. She went, and at the beach, first met a labor-and-employment lawyer, Bert. Six months later, they were married. Her husband, she said, is a committed feminist. Together, they came to the women's movement, reading feminist texts and raising three children on equal terms. The life she'd led on her own, she believes, permitted her to have an equitable marriage; she cofounded
Ms
.
Magazine
almost a decade after meeting Bert. “I've never had sex with anyone else in forty-eight years,” said Pogrebin. “Which is so astonishing to me, given my past.”

The great irony is that, as much as conservatives rage against the dying of traditional gender roles, by many measures, it's the people who are messing with the old marital expectations who might be credited with saving marriage as an institution.

Despite, or thanks to, the fact that Americans are staying single more often and for longer, have enjoyed increases in reproductive freedom and the ability to live promiscuously, engage in hookup culture, and have made gay marriage a reality, despite or thanks to all this: The majority of Americans will wind up married, or seriously committed to another person for some portion of their lives. And, right now, that sets the United States apart from many countries around the world.

In Japan, a nation with a downward-spiraling marriage rate, in competition with Germany for the lowest birthrate in the world, (with fewer babies born in 2014 than any other year on record) citizens have begun to abandon not just wedlock, but heterosexual sex itself, a trend the Japanese press refers to as
sekkusu shinai shokogun
, or celibacy syndrome.
¹
One study found that over sixty percent of men and almost half of unmarried Japanese women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are not engaged in any sort of romantic relationship, numbers that are ten percent higher than they were just five years earlier. Yet another study, commissioned by the Japan Family Planning Association, showed that 45 percent of women under twenty-four claimed that they “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.”
²
According to the Japanese magazine
Joshi Spa!
, 33.5 percent of Japanese people polled believe that marriage is “pointless.”
³

The rejection of straight coupling is closely linked to the inflexibility of gender roles in Japan. Japanese women are getting educations and making money, but find domestic expectations unadjusted. The Japanese workweek, designed for a man with a domestically submissive helpmeet at home, is strenuous, impossible to sustain for a woman who has a husband or children she is still supposed to tend with undivided attention. In Japan, working wives are referred to as “devil wives.” And so, according to
The Guardian,
90 percent of young Japanese women said, in a survey performed by Japan's Institute of Population and Social Security, that they would prefer to stay single than to enter into “what they imagine marriage to be like.”
⁴
Guardian
writer Abigail Howarth reported that an old Japanese saying “Marriage is a woman's grave” has today been repurposed to indicate that marriage “is the grave of [women's] hard-won careers.” As one thirty-two-year-old woman told Howarth, “You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income.”

Here is a cautionary tale about what happens to relations between the sexes when the scales are unbalanced, when societies fail to adjust to the increased liberty of their female population.

A similar phenomenon has emerged in Catholic countries, such as Italy, where there are rising cases of so-called
mammones
: mama's boys who, dissatisfied with the level of domestic devotion shown by their careerist female peers, continue to live with their cooking and cleaning mothers late into adulthood. The crude marriage rate (i.e., the number of marriages per 1000 inhabitants) fell in Italy from 7.7 in 1960 to just over 3 in 2013.
⁵

In Germany, where working mothers are referred to, darkly, as
rabenmutters
or “raven mothers,” and where, according to the Institute for Economic Research, only around 2 percent of senior management jobs were occupied by women,
⁶
the crude marriage rate has dropped by more than half, from 9.5 to 4.6 over the same period.

Compare those drastic declines in marriage rates to the Scandinavian nations, with more egalitarian social policy and attitudes, where women's increasing freedoms have been embraced both through social policy and cultural adjustment. In Finland, the crude marriage rate slid only from 7.4 in 1960 to 4.6 in 2013; in Sweden,
⁷
it dipped from 6.7 to just 5.4. Both those nations, in which the median age of first marriage for women is over thirty, used to have lower marriage rates than Italy and Germany; now their marriage rates are the same or higher.

Scandinavian citizens not only marry more often but form more stable committed unions outside marriage, evidence that progressive attitudes toward gender beget higher levels of heterosexual satisfaction and commitment. Cohabiting couples in Sweden are less likely than Americans to break up, and as sociologist Andrew Cherlin has pointed out, a child living with an unmarried pair of parents in Sweden “has a lower chance that his family will disrupt than does an American kid living with married parents.”
⁸
Amina Sow remembered her most serious relationship, with a Swede. “He asked how much my birth control was so we could split it,” she said. “Oh, my God, people who grow up in countries with equality!”

The United States, a comparatively youthful nation, born of Enlightenment thinking, with promises of individual liberty at its core, has also seen its marriage rates decline steeply over the past four decades. However,
the crude marriage rate, in 2012, was 6.8,
⁹
higher than any other nation in the Americas, and than anywhere in Western Europe.

There's an argument to be made that Americans' continued propensity to marry is evidence of the tenacity of patriarchal expectation in a country whose promises of liberty were false at the start, and in which true parity—for women, for people of color, for gay people—has been hard won and remains elusive.

I believe the reverse: that, in fact, it is the progressive nature of a nation that permits continuing revisions to its bedrock institutions—its constitution, its electorate, its definition of marriage—that has allowed marriage to evolve, to become more inclusive, more equal, and potentially more appealing to more people.

At the heart of the long American fight to challenge gender inequity have been the women who have been single by choice or by happenstance, for some protracted period or for the whole of their lives. These women (and the men who are their partners or their allies), through argument or just through their existence, have forced the country to expand to make new space for them.

Today's enormous population of single women is
still
fighting hard for that space, some in the Japanese style: by abstaining from marriages that they imagine might be unjust. One 2013 study found only 66 percent of women, as opposed to 79 percent of men, felt that being married was a necessary component of having it all, and, as journalist Amanda Hess noted, “the proportion of women who don't prioritize relationships in their definition of success has almost doubled—from 5 percent to 9 percent—since last summer.”
¹⁰
Similarly, sociologist Kathleen Gerson found, in researching her 2010 book,
The Unfinished Revolution
, that more than 70 percent of women would rather be unmarried than become housewives.
¹¹

But in Gerson's book about shifting domestic attitudes and social policy is a statistic that should give those worried about the fate of heterosexual partnership around the world hope for the United States: In addition to the 80 percent of the young American women Gerson sampled who desire egalitarian marriages in which wage earning, domestic duties, and childcare are divided equally, 70 percent of men now want the same thing.

The women who, for centuries, have been fighting to be able to stay single longer or forever, who have been blasting new paths and new space for themselves in the world, have made an impression on their fellow citizens. In delaying marriage, they have made it more conceivable to riff on it, to do it later, to do it differently, to do it better.

By demanding more from men and from marriage, it's single women who have perhaps played as large a part as anyone in saving marriage in America.

In the United States, demographers continue to predict that eighty percent of Americans will marry
¹²
at some point in their lives. As the
New York Times
reported, the change in marriage patterns “is more about postponement than abandonment.” While marriage has “declined precipitously among young women, both college graduates and women with less education” most “do eventually marry.”

But the
postponement
of marriage has, throughout the country's history, been one of the chief strategies to get women closer to a better match, ensuring that female adulthood is not defined only by the man to whom a woman binds herself at its start.